Here’s what I have to say about Midnight Magic on my website: “I know where the setting for this book entered my imagination—Naples, Italy, which I once visited. But the book came about because I wanted to write a scary book that wasn’t really scary, a ghost story, that may or may not have ghosts, and a tale of magic, that might, or might not have magic. But what really makes the book fun is the relationship between Mangus the magician, who does not believe in magic, and his servant boy, Fabrizio, who does believes in magic a great deal. The prequel to this book, which tells how the two came together, is called Murder at Midnight.”

Sophia’s War, just published, goes another way. Here all events, place, and most characters, are historically accurate. Even minor characters are real. BUT—the main character, Sophia (and her family), is a work of my imagination. That said, it is Sophia, who, if you will, causes the real events to happen. How can that be? In the celebrated case of Benedict Arnold and John André, though studied countless times by historians, there are some key events which happened but which have never fully been explained. Coincidence? Luck? The hand of Providence? Enter Sophia, and those events are explained in as exciting a way as I could write it. It is my attempt to give life to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion, “All history is biography.” Sophia’s War is real history, as lived by a real, fictitious person.